FreeOCR.AI vs Surya

FreeOCR.AI extracts editable text from photos, scans and screenshots, with tools for tables and user-defined fields. It recognizes printed text, clear handwriting, formulas and mixed layouts in more than 100 languages without manual language selection. Results can be copied or downloaded as TXT, Markdown or editable Word documents; table extraction can produce XLSX or CSV, and field values can be exported to CSV or Excel. Free online use handles one image at a time, with 10 free images per day shared across OCR, table and field extraction. New accounts receive 50 bonus credits. The portable desktop app for Windows x64, Windows ARM64 and macOS can process multiple images, PDFs or folders, saving results locally outside cloud history. Pro adds saved history, ad-free processing and ZIP downloads. Monthly Pro costs $10 a month, while Yearly Pro costs $80 a year. API access is a separate paid, usage-based service for image-to-text, table OCR and structured extraction.

Surya is a 650M-parameter OCR model for extracting text and analyzing document structure. It handles layout, reading order and tables, and supports OCR in 91 languages. Surya 2 returns page content as structured blocks that can include HTML, polygons, bounding boxes, confidence values and reading order. Table recognition can provide row and column geometry; full mode can also return HTML with spanning cells and header rows. Equations found in page OCR are represented as KaTeX-compatible LaTeX within math tags. Users can work with a Python package, command-line tools or an interactive Streamlit app for images and PDFs. Layout, OCR and table recognition require an inference backend: vLLM on NVIDIA GPUs or llama.cpp on CPU and Apple Silicon, or a connection to an existing server. Surya is free and open source. The code uses Apache 2.0, while the model weights have a separate modified AI Pubs Open Rail-M license with commercial-use conditions. It is specialized for documents, not photos or natural scenes.